Craigslist is suing several companies that scrape data from Craigslist advertisements. These companies, like Padmapper and 3taps, repurpose the data in order to provide more useful ways of searching through the ads. I have written about this in earlier posts, “Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice,” and “A Response to Jerry: Craig Should Still Dismiss.” Fundamentally, I think that the company’s tactic of litigating against perceived competitors is bad for Craigslist (because it limits the reach of its users’ ads and thus the success of Craigslist), it is bad for the law and policy of the web (because scraping of public web sites has historically been a well-established and permissible practice that beneficially spreads public information), and is in bad taste (given Craiglist’s ethos of doing well by doing good).

One of the most problematic aspects of the lawsuit is the set of claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and its California state-law counterpart. The CFAA, passed in 1986, introduces criminal and civil penalties for “unauthorized access” to “protected computers.” The CFAA was largely a reaction to generalized fear of “computer hacking,” and it did not envision the public internet as we know it today. Nevertheless, some have tried to apply the CFAA to public web sites. This approach has been widely frowned upon by both the tech community and the courts. For instance, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are actively pushing to reform the CFAA because it has been subject to prosecutorial abuse. Craigslist has nevertheless alleged violations of the CFAA based on access to their public web site.

Today I signed on to an an amicus brief written by the EFF–which was also co-signed by other scholars in the field–that urges the court to dismiss these ill-advised CFAA claims. The brief reads, in part:[Read more…]

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Arlington v. FCC. At issue was a very abstract legal question: whether the FCC has the right to interpret the scope of its own authority in cases in which congress has left the contours of their jurisdiction ambiguous. In short, can the FCC decide to regulate a specific activity if the statute could reasonably be read to give them that authority? The so-called Chevron doctrine gives deference to administrative agencies’ interpretation of of their statutory powers, and the court decided that this deference extends to interpretations of their own jurisdiction. It’s all very meta, but it turns out that it could be a very big deal indeed for one of those hot-button tech policy issues: net neutrality.

Scalia wrote the majority opinion, which is significant for reasons I will describe below. The opinion demonstrated a general skepticism of the telecom industry claims, and with classic Scalia snark, he couldn’t resist this footnote about the petitioners, “CTIA—The Wireless Association”:

This is not a typographical error. CTIA—The Wireless Association was the name of the petitioner. CTIA is presumably an (unpronounceable) acronym, but even the organization’s website does not say what it stands for. That secret, known only to wireless-service-provider insiders, we will not disclose here.

Ha. Ok, on to the merits of the case and why this matters for net neutrality.[Read more…]

Jerry Brito, a sometimes contributor to this blog, has a new post on the Reason blog arguing that I and others have been too harsh on Craigslist for their recent lawsuit. As I wrote in my earlier post, Craigslist should give up the lawsuit not just because it’s unlikely to prevail, but also because it risks setting bad precedents and is downright distasteful. Jerry argues that what the startups that scrape Craigslist data are doing doesn’t “sit well,” and that there are a several reasons to temper criticism of Craigslist.

I remain unconvinced.

To begin with, the notion that something doesn’t “sit well” is not necessarily a good indicator that one can or should prevail in legal action. To be sure, tort law (and common law more generally) develops in part out of our collective notion of what does or doesn’t seem right. Jerry concedes that the copyright claims are bogus, and that the CFAA claims are ill-advised, so we’re left with doctrines like misappropriation and trespass to chattels. I’ll get to those in a moment.[Read more…]

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